The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Mocking the ‘ghosts’ on our corners
When I came upon Joe Fekieta (also known as Joey Tomorrow) last Sunday at City-Wide Open Studios in the Goffe Street Armory, I was shocked to see his “politically incorrect” exhibit making fun of the homeless and hungry people we often see in downtown NewHaven and elsewhere.
Fekieta was standing in a small room, surrounded by cardboard signs, odd artifacts and pairs of shoes and sneakers. His artwork was titled “Homeless and Hungry 25 Cent Project.”
I stared at the signs; they described, in often satiric terms, a homeless and hungry novelist, baseball player, factory worker, stockbroker, nurse, plumber, pimp, musician, barber, carpet installer, cancer patient, schoolteacher and journalist.
For instance, here’s what Fekieta wrote on the journalist’s sign, of which I took special interest: “Changed from investigating corruption to just working on my tan. Please help!”
The factory worker: “Spent 40 years on an assembly line ’til my employer moved to China. Now it’s back, with robots doingmy work. Please help!”
But most of the characters made it clear Fekieta was making fun of their professed need for assistance. He scrawled on the sign for the homeless and hungry novelist: “My agent dropped me and I don’t want to self-publish. I don’t have any new material. Please help!”
I asked Fekieta why he had propped a broken ladder up against a wall, with shoes at the bottom rung.
“That’s the hungry and homeless corporate ladder,” he told me. “The shoes are very ghost-like; that’s all you see. These people are ghosts stuck on the corner. They’ve lost all power.”
He also told me the hungry and homeless are living “an animal-like existence.”
“I’m mocking the homeless and hungry sympathy movement,” Fekieta said. “Most of it is alcohol-and-drugs-related. That’s what puts them there and keeps them there. It’s very sad.”
Regular readers of this column know I sometimese write sympathetic profiles of the people we see on those corners with their signs. I decided I would give Fekieta a chance to express his contrary viewpoint, I arranged to visit him at his home in New Haven’s “Hill” neighborhood.
Fekieta noted he lives within a few blocks of Columbus House, the shelter for yep, the homeless and the hungry.
“I’m more aware of this problem because I live near Columbus House,” he admitted. “They’re always on the (Ella T. Grasso) Boulevard, standing there on the corner. It’s in my face.”
“I never see panhandlers on McKinley Avenue or Orange Street,” he noted, referring to New Haven’s wealthy neighborhoods of Westville and East Rock.
When I arrived lastWednesday morning at Fekieta’s house in a much less wealthy neighborhood, he told me he has owned the building for 26 years. He lives on the first floor with a gray cat named Buddy and rents out the upstairs apartment.
As I sat on the couch with Buddy, I asked Fekieta about this Joey Tomorrow angle.
“It just popped into my head,” he said. “The impetus to have a pseudonym came from an incomplete experience I had in Korea. A teacher inmy traditional Korean brush painting class wanted to give me an artist’s name but I didn’t feel I deserved it then.”
Fekieta said he had a chance to do that brush painting class because he was in Korea with the U.S. Army from January 1974 to January 1975.
“I volunteered to go. I was desperate to get out of my neighborhood: Pearl Street, off State Street” in New Haven.
After the Army, he earned a degree at Syracuse University in fine arts. But in order to pay his daily bills, he became a house painter, which he still does.
‘GHOSTS’ » PAGE 5